Why attack someone for an opinion? I agree that pure cynicism is toxic online, and merely pointing out flaws without solutions can be worse than useless, but that message was not this.
I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.
GP has a fair counterpoint. Yes, PG, like every pundit, is biased. Yes, many of us here read his essays in our younger, more naive years, and it took time to learn how they're not as seminal as we thought. But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal[0], which is not very interesting or useful.
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[0] - 'dang described it long ago as behaving as if there was a great hash table in the sky, mapping a person's name to the simplest and most well-known fault of them, and as if commenters were somehow obliged to dereference that hash table every time some person's name is mentioned.
The hash-table response is a good one -- you're right.
But I still interpret it as debiasing tool for those that aren't very familiar to PG's writing, so it's not really useless. After all, there must still be new HN users all the time, for which some things are worth repeating (just not too often).
> But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal...
Eh. I think of it as a warning that younger us (or -at least- younger me) would have very, very, very much appreciated when we were first reading the essays.
Yeah, _you_ have had these realizations about how less-profound-than-they-seem the essays are, and _you_ have read the essay(s). But, like, the essays keep popping up... why not also keep mentioning that they're not as profound as they seem? There's _always_ going to be someone who's reading the essays for the first time, so why discourage folks from providing the new reader the opportunity to read valid criticism of the essays developed over the years?
Fine, but that comment was not a proper criticism or a warning - it was a dismissal. Even having revised my opinions on pg and his writings, I find coldtea's summary to be unfair.
Maybe you should ask the same question to SunghoYahng, the user who started this thread? That wasn’t very constructive either, and neither was coldtea’s response.
“I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals”
They were being just as curt as nickpp. What they wrote was not as reasonable as your lines above, hence the response. From my pov, the main reason that you’re criticizing nickpp is because his opinion doesn’t match your own.
The irony here is that I’m more sympathetic to your viewpoint, but I’ll try to be constructive beyond just calling you out:
* These essays take a lot of work to write
* These essays are not hidden behind a paywall
* The essays capture the POV of a successful startup founder and more importantly a successful startup investor
* Does the advice apply to everyone? Probably not everyone 100%. I doubt many of his essays even apply to 25% of people, or even 10% depending on the topic.
* still, many people have profited off pg’s advice in some way
* If you don’t like pg’s essays, you don’t have to read them
* pg founded HN. Don’t be surprised to see people defending pg here.
I'm not entitled to consider that my personal life or career choices should be pushed onto others as advice.
So, my ...advice is for people to follow much more timeless wisdom which has worked great for billions, and not get into the cult of some rich/succesful or into cults of personality.
For all my life (and I am not spring chicken) I noticed one thing: criticism, cynicism and pessimism sell. They are attractive. They compel us, because they are easy and cheap. There is no cost attached in becoming a victim. No cost in saying "that's not for me - I can't get it".
Optimism on the other hand and especially tech optimism is almost a slur nowadays. Very few voices support them, very few cheerleaders. And that is a shame - the whole world depends on these optimists. We need them to solve the problems facing our civilization. To have successful startups we need failed ones. Advances are not easy, they are damn hard and people willing to try are few and far in between and they need our support.
And finally in the last 20 years I met and interacted with hundreds (maybe thousands) of people in our field. The ones who TRIED - few successes but zero regrets. Even failures lead to positive outcomes in the end.
The only regrets and bitterness were predictably from the ones who for some reason or another were discouraged to try. They always have an excuse, some situation to point to that made them victims. But in the end it was a preexisting belief, an idea or opinion or mind virus that did the most damage to their you world-view.
Very few will lose trying to emulate a successful person. None will gain anything trying to follow coldtea's advice.
>For all my life (and I am not spring chicken) I noticed one thing: criticism, cynicism and pessimism sell. They are attractive.
Not as much as the multi-trillion dollar industry for "how to make it big" advice, business and startup hussle culture, magic bullets and/or grind p0rn, and so on, all built on optimism, and aiming at an ever renewable supply of fresh naives.
I've never read any essay written by Paul Graham which had a point I hadn't read before somewhere or else or otherwise encountered a thought of his which was was actually original or new. He just repackages general truisms, common-sense or someone else's thought and because he's Paul Graham it gets attention and people post his essay up on HN. That's it.
PG's been writing these essays long before HN or YC. Actually those essays in the beginning made him known and helped him attract the first batches of founders. Those founders (and subsequent ones) have done incredible things. They have created and added tremendous value to countless people's life.
So there is value in these essays. You don't have to see it or appreciate it but denigrating it just turns the question on you: who are you? what have you done? what do you have to show and teach us?
It's possible and indeed normal to critique things even if you are not famous or notable and that's a fairly poor argument against any critic. People who never written a play or poem write critiques of Shakespeare all the time, should they be banned from doing so because they're not playwrights or poets?
Likewise, it's possible for someone to manage a sports team, successfully I might add, even if they were never a top player in that sport. My point is, I don't need to be a billionaire or found a successful company to be able to critique Paul Graham's writing. I personally find it banal and would rather seek out writers who came up with novel ideas, like for example Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell to name a couple.
Also everything should be a startup working towards a VC exit.